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DavidAgain comments on Rationality Quotes: March 2011 - Less Wrong
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I guess the question is whether this is perception of truth or 'truthiness'. On the one hand, people can have a deep sense that something is inevitably true that then turns out to be false. On the other, some individuals, such as Einstein, seem to be good at recognising the sort of aesthetic elegance that suggests a true theory
On the whole, I'm sceptical about the 'direct perception of truth' idea: it tends to suggest that all we need to do is clear away a certain level of obvious biases and then we can trust our gut. And that others who demand evidence for things we consider obvious are nit-pickers and nay-sayers. Not sure that's very good for rationality.
Fair points, but rather different from what I took home from that quote. I saw Davy as saying more that the wonder inherent in hypothesis-generation is closely identified with the aesthetic wonder of art of music -- and presumably of unexplained magic tricks. I wouldn't be too terribly surprised to discover that they all engage the same reward pathways on a biological level.
We do need filters, but that's where the imagination/reason distinction comes in. However wonderful it is to generate ideas, it's only by checking them that we free up space for the next wonderful idea.
It can certainly be read that way: and I'd agree that this is often the 'creative source of discovery'. My problem is the line about 'perception of truth', which I think appeals to a too-common idea that we have a natural 'truth-sensing' apparatus and we just need to clear stuff out of the way. It's dangerous for science and other human discovery if we assume that the first satisfaying, consistent explanation of something is true.